How the J.Crew catalog became the most exciting thing in ’80s fashion
THIRTY-FIVE years ago, print media was having a renaissance. And the uncontested leader of the medium, with more cultural relevance than most magazines or books, was a clothing catalog, delivered free of charge to every home in America, fourteen times a year. During the ’80s and early ’90s, J.Crew was more than just a clothing mail-order business. Their catalogs embodied “the delicate brine of a clambake wafting in the air; the particular romance of a misty morning at a rustic lakehouse,” writes Maggie Bullock, author of “The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J.Crew” (Dey Street Books).
In other words, they offered a fantasy, something that customers weren’t getting from conventional retail. Kelly Hill, a future catalog stylist for J. Crew, told Bullock that during her college years in the late ’80s, the “arrival of a new J.Crew catalogue was an event.”
Hill’s roommates would “pour over each glossy page, beer in hand, shrieking over their favorite characters.”
It was a ritual that had little to do with shopping. This wasn’t something college students did “with Lands’ End or L.L.Bean,” Bullock writes. “You didn’t do it with Glamour or Vogue, either.”
Nobody could have predicted that J.Crew would become such a cultural phenomenon.
It was the second act for Popular Merchandise, Inc., a New Jersey-based company founded in 1947 as a mens’ haberdashery before transitioning into discounted women’s clothing. By the early ‘80s, owners Arthur Cinader (the founder’s son) and daughter Emily Cinader decided to reinvent the business as a catalog-only retailer, to stay competitive in a market where catalogs looked like the future.
Although catalogs had been around for a century — during the Cold War, Bullock notes that Soviet spies were required to study the Sears catalog to learn how to “look, act, and think American” — they were experiencing a resurgence in the ’80s, thanks to the rise of career women. “Having it all” left precious little time for browsing at department stores, but a catalog… “now that a woman could peruse anytime, anywhere,” writes Bullock.
BEFORE settling on J. Crew, the new brand’s fictional “surname” was almost Sir Edward Coke, an obscure English magistrate. But Emily convinced her dad that “coke,” at least in America, was more closely associated with either soda or illegal drugs. They settled on J. Crew, an amalgam of the initial J — borrowed from J. Press, the storied Ivy League clothier— and crew, the rowing sport. “Polo was a colonial sport played by princes,” writes Bullock, “but crew conjured crisp fall days, term papers, canoodling in the stacks.”
But their reputation was built on more than a name.
Their catalogs found a middle ground between the out-of-reach priciness of Ralph Lauren and the “folksy” charm of Lands’ End.
Though “The Official Preppy Handbook,” a humor book that became a huge bestseller in the early ’80s, certainly helped J.Crew’s image — it “reset the style goals of popular kids at lunch tables across America,” writes Bullock — “preppy” was not a word that Emily or the J.Crew writers ever used.
Tierney Horne, J.Crew's creative director during the ’80s, recoiled at the idea that their clothes were preppy. “We were cool,” she told Bullock. “Preppy wasn’t cool.”
What was cool, at least according to
Emily and her art team, was creating a clothing catalog that didn’t feel forced or inauthentic.
The rule was “no fakery” at all costs. One former J.Crew catalog editor recalled how the entire staff would review new art together and look for signs of artifice.
“We’d all call out: Fake smile! Too model-y!” he told Bullock.
If a model was giving a cliché, handover-mouth giggle, it was immediately trashed. J.Crew girls don’t tee-hee, they laughed.
“The litmus test of a great J.Crew picture was: Could it pass for a snapshot?” Bullock writes.
Their other secret: the J.Crew models (or “characters”) were always in motion. “For every shoot, there was a destination, and for every destination there were activities,” writes Bullock.
This could be anything from ice-skating in the Adirondacks to beach picnicking in the Hamptons.
“If a model looks stiff, throw her on a bike,” Bullock writes.
“Hand her a picnic basket. Assign her a boyfriend with whom to play an endlessly thrilling game of tag. Give the boyfriend some shaving cream and a razor. This guy is shaving… on the beach? In his swim trunks? Just go with it.”
Tierney Gearon, a J.Crew photographer from the era, says she approached the shoots like they were films, with huge crews and big productions.
“I create a lot of chaos, so the models aren’t really paying attention to the camera,” she told Bullock.
THE effort to make things appear like these were actual people you could encounter out in the real world involved more than just making sure the actors weren’t playing to the camera.
Every detail was meticulously curated so they never seemed like props.
“Other catalogs might drag a sailboat onto the beach so everybody could pose in front of it,” Eve Combemale, a J.Crew stylist from the late ’80s, told the author. “J.Crew would take three boats out on the water and really be sailing.”
Just as important, at least to Arthur Cinader, was the text.
Although he hired the best copywriters, he “policed their words until, in the
Other catalogs might drag a sailboat onto the beach. J.Crew would . . . really be sailing. — Former J.Crew catalog stylist